Brazil Slashes Money for Project Aimed at Protecting Amazon
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
RIO DE JANEIRO,
Brazil -- Under intense pressure to reduce its spending, the Brazilian
government has slashed funds toward a
$250 million
pilot project backed by seven leading industrial nations that has been
the centerpiece of Brazil's efforts to save the
Amazon rain
forest.
Environmentalists
warn that without Brazil's participation, the project stands to lose almost
all the donations yet to come from the Group
of Seven industrial
nations. Under the main agreement, approved at the 1992 Earth Summit here,
Brazil was to provide just 10 percent of
the $250 million.
The pilot program
pays for surveying the rain forest, and it has been the principal vehicle
for marking off 40,000 square miles for
indigenous reservations.
Surveying what
is in the vast mysterious rain forest is seen as the first step toward
protecting it from destruction by ranchers, loggers,
farmers and
miners.
The Group of Seven money was also earmarked for promoting sustainable development, controlling deforestation and other objectives.
In addition,
the money also would have helped pay for setting aside 10 percent of the
rain forest, or 240,000 square miles, as national
parks and ecologically
protected areas. Amid much fanfare, Brazil's president, Fernando Henrique
Cardoso, had pledged to establish the
protected areas
during a visit to New York last April.
Covering an area
half as big as the continental United States, the Amazon is a lush laboratory
of plants, animals and bacteria that contains
more than 20
percent of the world's fresh water supply.
Throughout much
of the decade, as other countries criticized Brazil for failing to protect
the rain forest, the government insisted that
wealthy nations
pay to map the rain forest and to protect its resources, and it frequently
contended that the scale of the program agreed to
was insufficient
to the task.
But environmentalists
say that even that modest effort is now in jeopardy. Under pressure to
rein in its budget deficit, Brazilian government
officials have
slashed spending across the board. A recent agreement with the International
Monetary Fund, which is spearheading a
$41.3 billion
standby loan for Brazil, reduces government spending on environmental programs
by two-thirds.
Under the pilot
program, the Brazilian government provides matching funds and manpower
to administer the Group of Seven grant. The
government's
revised budget, released in November, cuts the amount Brazil can expect
to get from the group to $6.4 million from more
than $61 million.
"It is arguably
a far more irrational and perverse consequence of the IMF agreement than
even the harshest critics of the IMF could have
imagined," said
Stephan Schwartzman, a senior scientist at the Washington-based Environmental
Defense Fund.
The state of
Acre, in western Brazil, one of the nine states covered by the rain forest,
had developed a three-year program counting on
some $5 million
of the Group of Seven funds to survey and zone its forest. Ninety percent
of the cost would have been underwritten by
the group.
"When it was
all under way and ready to move forward -- boom -- the cuts came," said
Maria Janet Santos, who is coordinating zoning
for Acre's environmental
protection agency. "It really cuts into the credibility of what we're trying
to do."
Paulo de Oliveira
Lopes, who also works on the zoning project, said that without the Brazilian
government contribution, the project would
collapse. "Without
the resources of the G-7 to carry out zoning, there's no way it can happen,"
he said.
Congress is expected
to vote on the budget by Jan. 15, and Sen. Marina Silva of the opposition
Workers' Party said the government had
not ruled out
restoring the environmental funds if cuts could be found elsewhere.